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We are planning on migrating from Jira+Gerrit to GitLab. One important feature that we are using in Jira is the auto generation of release notes.

Question: Is there any similar functionality in GitLab?

hfm
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  • 7 years later( 2020, this is supported by a gitlab-ci workflow now, on GitLab: see [my edited answer below](https://stackoverflow.com/a/23322600/6309) – VonC Nov 01 '21 at 22:41

3 Answers3

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2020: this is possible with GitLab, see:

How GitLab is automating release generation in .gitlab-ci.yml, from Jackie Meshell

The release-cli tool is written in Go and can be called directly to create a Release via the API, given the right job token and parameters are provided.
The more likely way users will interact with this tool will be in the YAML file as a job:

release_upload:
  image: registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-cli:v0.1.0
  script:
    - gitlab-releaser create --name="My Release" --description="My Release description"

Note that GitHub also support a similar feature in Oct. 2021, as annouced in GitHub Universe 2021.

2014: Not in GitHub directly.

If your commit messages follow some policy, you could consider generating a release note from said commits.

See for instance:

VonC
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  • Sry I meant GitLab and not GitHub. So the 2:nd option is not an option! :) – hfm May 04 '14 at 13:22
  • @UT_lol sure, but you get the general idea: as long as you can rxtract (from git notes or git commit messages or...) relevant information for release notes, you can generate them that way.a – VonC May 04 '14 at 13:26
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Well, update to gitlab 8.2.0 https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/

It says you have the ability to add release notes (markdown text and attachments) to git tags (aka Releases).

Now just create a tag per release, and then you'll see the markdown.

Henry Aloni
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If you are interested, I have developed a Python lib to generate release notes or changelog automatically, listing merge requests since the last release of a GitLab repository. The source code is here with instructions on how to use it: https://github.com/vuillaut/gitlab_release_notes

You may use the online app here for a more convenient approach: https://purl.org/gitlab_release_notes/app

Tom Tom
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